Roundtable Meetings

Where

Here: Live

When

The regular schedule is to meet on the third Thursday of each month. The exact meeting time each month is 14h UTC as per Picking a time for a community meeting, so you can block your schedule a year in advance 😊 If there are exceptions, they will be announced well ahead of time.

The meetings usually last two hours.

2024 Meetings

General structure

General structure of a monthly roundtable meeting

These are general guidelines, and we'll adapt according to the feedback of participants. The roundtable meetings have quite diverse topics and they are intended to attract all interested community members, from new users to experienced developers. The Facilitator is warmly suggested to prepare a bit the meeting he has in charge by doing anything he’ll feel appropriate. If you would like to present a meeting and be the Facilitator, please just volunteer by putting your name on this wiki page and the page of the meeting.

Among some ideas that may help:

Reminding and communicating about the meeting (mailing list, announcement, FB, IRC, XMPP etc).
Creating the Wiki page for the meeting as a child page within this Wiki Structure of Roundtable Meetings, so that links are updated automatically and the page can be easily found from more places.
Check hot topic and try to have a minimum of topics (including relevant screenshots, links, demo, etc).
Check with the members that raised questions, issues or committed enhancement or new feature if they would like to present it.
Check with the members that introduce or talk about advanced ways to use a feature in Tiki if they want to demonstrate it live more deeply.
Check with members or team if there are no "Hot" topics (release process, event, deadline, etc).
Anything they have in mind that can enrich general knowledge about Tiki or technologies (to be) used or Tiki community or human interaction between members or ... (you got the idea 😊 )

The meeting lasts 2 hours (more or less) and the schedule is inspired by Open Space Technology events.

First hour: Quick news

Any topic of max 15 minutes each

All people that are new to the community can introduce themselves and explain what they are working on / interested in.
Teams report updates, if any.
Then, any quick news, questions, presentations, anything goes.
- We start with what is on the wiki page, and then continue to anything people want to talk about Anything which lasts more than 15 minutes is put on the agenda for the second hour.
If you would like to suggest (but not present) a topic, please contact the facilitator. He’ll help to coordinate.

So, in the first hour, there are many (10-20) topics and everyone should attend. Most of the topics will be announced before the meeting, but some are just brought up live.

Second hour

Any topic of more than 15 minutes

For the second hour, all the topics are announced beforehand or determined during the first hour, plus some special section carried over on all meetings to review bugs and issues affecting the Tiki Community sites and project. So you should definitely attend the first hour, but then, you can stay on or leave depending on your interest for the topics. If you would like to suggest (but not present) a topic, please contact the facilitator. He’ll help to coordinate.

Usual section since January 2017:

Review of the pending Tiki Community Items (issues and wishes affecting the Community as a whole and *.t.o sites), for up to 15 minutes. See
https://dev.tiki.org/Community+items#Summary and https://dev.tiki.org/Community+items#List
(Why this?)

Examples of other topics:

Features in stable version: This is to present new(ish) features that are available in the most recent stable version of Tiki, as of now: Tiki16. This is, therefore, suitable for a wide audience, not just developers who wish to attend.
Examples of Tiki in Use: This is for users or site administrators to present their Tiki sites. Of most interest will be how various powerful features of Tiki are combined and configured to create an application. Also interesting would be theme customizations or other feature customizations that enabled these sites, but just simple configuration or Profiles are interesting as well. Also suitable for a wide audience.
Developer discussion: This is for developers to present and discuss latest work that could have been either committed to trunk, in an experimental branch, or even still only in planning phase. Although this meeting is targeted more at developers, everyone is welcome to listen in and learn. The format provides for a longer presentation and more question and answer time, and is likely to have more discussion.
- Developer-focused discussion on how to improve code or development process
- New things in trunk (for Tiki 17)
- Coding style
- Merging & branching
- Schedule of releases
- Desired architecture changes
- Guest appearance by devs of libraries we use (ex.: Smarty, Zend Framework, etc.)
- New developers that have some questions on how to get started: this is the time to ask experienced Tiki developers
Community discussion
- Improving things in the community
- How does this feature work?
- Is anyone working on X?
Whatever is on your mind
etc.

Rules of thumb

If we have a guest speaker, we should think about this.

When we record a meeting we should think about the future "listeners".
When we record a meeting, if we have a guest speaker, we should think that this guest will most likely want to embed the recording on his website so that others can benefit from it.
When we record a meeting we should plan it so that only "controlled" information circulates in the chat room.

Notes

Preparation for the meeting
- A headset and ability to raise or lower microphone gain is a good start. It is very painful to have people with very low level (for whom you have to turn the knob full-volume) and other with very high level.
- It is also asked as courtesy toward the other participants to avoid having the mic open all the time if you are in a noisy place, eating during the meeting, etc.
- Previously, BigBlueButton used Flash, so the Puffin browser was needed to participate with a mobile device, but the meetings now use HTML5 and not Flash, so any modern browser will work fine.
- Keep in mind that if using a 3g/4g connection, a 60-minute meeting might consume 150-200 Mb of the data plan of your contract, as a reference.
- Presentations should be prepared in a format supported by BigBlueButton, such as PDF. Tiki9 offers export from S5 Slideshow to PDF.
- Keep in mind that URLs can be shared via the BigBlueButton chatroom
- Keep relevant URLs for the discussion topics handy, so that when the meeting starts and the discussion on the topic are in place, you can easily add relevant resources to feed the discussion and base your arguments, etc.
- Ideally, we want a different presenter each month.
During the meeting:
- As a starting point, it's advisable that you disable any program synchronizing files with the internet in the background, such as Dropbox or similar, as this might severely interfere with your bandwidth needed for the conference.
- At the beginning: Since audio settings of each attendant's computer can be quite different and need fine tuning, it is been suggested that to say our names, nicks, and place of origin (something very short) with our mics. This way we would allow others to detect when someone needs to adjust the microphone (distance, volume, etc.).
- After the presentations, there will generally be a question period.
- To keep the flow of these meeting, the meeting's wiki page can be used for ongoing discussion after the meeting, and for difficult questions be thought about more deeply after the webinar rather than trying to cover every angle completely during the limited time of the meeting.
After the meeting
- The recording should be added to the relevant feature page on doc.tiki.org or dev.tiki.org

I have an idea
For feature requests and ideas on how to improve Tiki and/or BigBlueButton to be better tools for meetings (formerly called webinars: dev:Webinars ). For ideas on how we are using existing features, suggest a change of topic or schedule, please talk to the facilitator if it concern a single meeting and if this concern the meeting in general suggest the discussion with the other member as a topic.

Kaltura webinars

Past Roundtable Meetings (previously called webinars)

This list includes all pages with the word "webinar" so that past webinars are shown below (also future webinars, but for the sake of simplicity, we will keep this list as comprehensive dynamic list of webinar pages at tiki.org).

2023 Meetings